I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
It was the creation and spread of Capitalism, before this Europe was technologically and economically backwards compared to Eurasia. First applied by the Dutch in the 15th and 16th centuries, then significantly improved and expanded by the English a couple centuries later. Capitalism was not adopted by most of Europe at first, the feudal monarchs and Catholic church kept stomping out the budding capitalism enclaves in most of Europe.
Nation states however had to begin to form to protect themselves from other nation states. Napoleonic France, for instance, smashed apart the continental feudal system and forced them all to adopt modern systems to even come close to competing with French military concentrations and artillery production. As soon as there’s one or two Liberal Bourgeois nation states with the engines of Capital roaring, the others had to follow or be destroyed.
However, capitalism has to constantly expand and could not remain on Europe. This is where we see colonialism come into full swing. The first waves of colonizers and settlers and conquistadors and explorers were all hugely debt-ridden, fleeing from their debtors or seeking fortune in the new world and colonies. It was also mostly the poor dredges of society in Europe that were forced out into the colonies (see: Australia where they sent their prisoners and debtors), the actual foot soldiers of colonization had a gun trained on their back by banks and capitalists, even while they had their guns trained on the natives and indigenous people they colonized. Here you can see the system dumping its “externalities” and contradictions onto others outside the capitalist internal system, and sucking up resources and wealth and labor to fuel itself. Capitalism is not sustainable, it requires these inputs and outputs. A global capitalist system cannot exist in perpetuity without crisis and war.
Nowhere else in the world had this hot-zone of bourgeois nation states warring against each other that then had to expand outwards by force or face internal crisis and revolution.